Glaive, IRL

“As long as I’m able to show myself [that I’m] an artist, that’s really all I care about. I don’t really care if anybody else sees me as that.” Photo: Lyndon French for Vulture/Lyndon French

Less than an hour before his first official performance as glaive, Ash Gutierrez is arguing with his mom about mascara. He’s meticulously planned his on-stage look, and this is the final touch. “All this is very artistic,” he tells me minutes before, flashing his hands, black-and-white X’s drawn on top and nails painted to match. He’s sitting on the ground in a white button-down shirt and black pants, parting the curly, overgrown mop on his head so his mother, Rebecca, can touch up the makeup. A voice comes from the couch in his tent, crowded with a posse of musician friends: “It looks good, man. No one’s gonna be able to tell.”

This isn’t for the crowd, though — this is for Gutierrez. “Everything, to me, has a meaning, even if it doesn’t have any meaning to people that are watching it,” he says. “As long as I’m able to show myself [that I’m] an artist, that’s really all I care about. I don’t really care if anybody else sees me as that.” But between the formal outfit (for a teenager usually caught wearing T-shirts or hoodies) and the expressive touches (for a free-thinker rarely caught without his nails painted), the message seems clear: Yes, this is a special occasion for Gutierrez, but no, he’s not going to reverse course on what got him here for it.

After such an exclusively online rise over the past year-and-a-half, it’s striking to hear Gutierrez, at all of 16 years old, put so much stock into his live performance. He began recording music and releasing it on SoundCloud in early 2020, as a 15-year-old in Hendersonville, North Carolina, a city outside Asheville with a population around 14,000. (He pulled his artist name from Dark Souls, a video-game series he’d been into at the time.) His playful, pixelated blend of trap, emo, and pop proved addictive, catching the attention of Spotify’s “hyperpop” playlist right as it was becoming a kingmaker for the budding subgenre known for exaggerating and contorting all of modern pop’s fundamentals, built on Charli XCX, SOPHIE, and 100 gecs. By the time things began to align for Gutierrez — a manager, a two-EP deal at Interscope Records — the COVID-19 pandemic had already upended touring and concerts. That pause stunted the rise of many artists, but not Gutierrez, who racked up tens of millions of streams across both those Interscope EPs and a steady flow of collaborations, all while adjusting to taking his high-school classes over Zoom. And notably, unlike many of the pop artists who’ve done impressive numbers in the thick of the pandemic, Gutierrez’s success owes little to TikTok; he’s deleted his own account multiple times, having said he doesn’t “get” it (he’s posted just seven videos so far this year).

If Gutierrez is nervous about anything now, it’s how those numbers will translate live. “I don’t know if anybody’s going to be there,” he admits. He’s performing on something close to home turf: Summer Smash, the Chicago hip-hop festival put on by Lyrical Lemonade, the blog-turned-music-video-studio that gave Gutierrez some of his earliest coverage. (Founder Cole Bennett recently directed a glaive music video, released days after the festival.)

When Summer Smash debuted in 2018, glaive would have been an outlier on the lineup, where every artist was a rapper or hip-hop DJ. Gutierrez has never seen himself as a rapper, even if some artists he associates with make music closer to hip-hop and his own work is built from the bones of the emo-rap that Lyrical Lemonade first championed. (He recently found himself starstruck during an opportunity to work with Juice WRLD beat-maker Nick Mira, a key architect of that melodic, maladjusted rap world.) Lately, though, Lyrical Lemonade has noticed its largely Gen-Z audience’s taste is no longer as homogenous, either — they’ll go for whatever blend of cathartic lyrics and catchy beats can bring them to “mosh-pit utopia,” as Stereogum declared in a review of this year’s festival, and they trust Lyrical Lemonade’s endorsement in finding it. That could mean a rapper like Swae Lee or Lil Baby, a top-40 favorite like the Kid Laroi or 24kGoldn, or a hyperpop musician like glaive or ericdoa. Not that Gutierrez sees himself as a hyperpop musician either, taking issue with the breadth of often unrelated music that gets slotted under the label because of one Spotify playlist. “I feel like hyperpop is not a genre,” he told the New York Times last year, for a story on the scene the playlist has built.

By the time we arrive at the side stage where Gutierrez is performing, he now has a perfect drip of mascara running down his left cheek. His posse — a group of fellow teenage hyperpop musicians including ericdoa, midwxst, glasear, and Zetra — has followed, performing impromptu freestyles and handing stickers to fans in the crowd to pass the time. His parents are there too, risking the embarrassment of wearing cargo shorts and sandals to a rap festival, in his dad’s case, to support their son. But Gutierrez isn’t engaging much with any of them like he did back at the tent. Instead, he’s staying back in the golf cart that brought him across the festival grounds, now parked next to two backstage porta-potties, having the quietest moment of his entire evening. He’s scribbling on a sheet of paper, filling it with “every single negative emotion” he was feeling ahead of the performance — words like “anxiety” and “negative energy.” As he finishes, he finds a lighter and burns the paper. A young kid who’s wandered over watches in shock, but Gutierrez doesn’t seem to mind.

“I’m probably going to try to do it for every single show,” he promises aloud to himself later. “After I did that, I was like, Okay, it’s time to do this shit. I was ready.”

Things aren’t looking great at Lenny’s Tent, where Gutierrez will be performing. His set is delayed, due to another artist being added last minute right before him, and the crowd is looking thin. There’s a moment of worry about whether the festival will have a DJ for Gutierrez, as the rider promised. (Gutierrez doesn’t have much of a live infrastructure yet, also choosing to rely on the screen and smoke machines already at the stage.) But minutes after Gutierrez’s set was supposed to start, at 6:10 p.m., things start to fall into place. Fifteen or so exceptionally loud fans rush to the backstage fence, where Gutierrez obliges them with some quick photos. After 15 minutes of waiting, the crowd — which has swelled to around 500 closely packed teens and 20-somethings, drinking and vaping to pass time — starts a chant: “We want glaive!”

It’s 6:34 p.m., minutes after his set was already supposed to be finished, when Gutierrez finally takes the stage. “I was so scared there would be fucking nobody here, but fuck!” he tells the crowd. He launches into “1984,” the opening track off his second EP, all dogs go to heaven, released just a few weeks before on August 6. Like any glaive song, it’s laden with hooks, counterbalancing breezy verses with a chorus that crushes once the dissonant beat comes in. By technical criteria, his performance doesn’t sound “great” — he’s singing right over the album track, recorded vocals and all, which only punctuates the roughness of his unedited voice or when he hits the wrong note. It’s not long into the set before he pulls out his in-ear monitors, frustrated that he can only hear feedback, like most new to performing. All his cues now are instinctual — he’s guided by a mix of emotion, adrenaline, and what just feels right.

The crowd is here for emotional community over quality control, he quickly gathers. They want to share in songs about feeling anxious, frustrated, and confused, to shout lyrics like, “I’m so pissed, I’m angry as fuck” and “I wanna slam my head against the wall.” Gutierrez insists he’s usually a happy person, and the crowd knows this, too. Before the show, someone sidestage explains that they’re trying to make the nickname “hyperpop heartthrob” stick, owing to Gutierrez’s charming public persona, as someone who exudes over-caffeinated energy with a slightly offbeat sense of humor, and who isn’t too interested in filtering any of that for fans. “He’s like a little bright star in a little dark area,” ericdoa offers. “That’s why people love Ash so much.” That love is in full bloom during his performance; Gutierrez emits his casual enthusiasm and the crowd feeds it right back to him, smiling and jumping and singing every word. “You could sit there and dissect the lyrics and think about what they really truly mean and how they’re sad or this or that,” Gutierrez says, but that would miss the full picture. “You’re saying these words, and as you’re saying them, you’re letting go of the meaning. Or you’re saying the meaning with it, and then as soon as you’re done, you’re done. You’ve said what needs to be said.”

Gutierrez wants to do whatever he can to give the crowd that sort of release. He spends nearly all 20 minutes of his set teetering on top of an amp in front of the stage, trying to get as close to the crowd as possible — at his own peril, considering that he’s six-foot-four and at multiple points looks like he could fall quite a long way off after a jump. Multiple times, he offers the crowd water bottles, dispatching the hyperpop posse and the security guards to hand them out. He tells them again how worried he was that no one would come to his set, that he was “shitting bricks.” (And yes, his mom captures it all on video, Kris Jenner style, standing at the top of a set of bleachers next to the crowd.)

Late into the set, Gutierrez performs “2009,” a song he released in November 2020 on his first EP, cypress grove. Live, his vocals aren’t pitched-up the way it is on the recording, when he “sounded less confident in my voice,” he says of his earlier music. “I was trying to make it higher so it didn’t sound as much like me.” That changed on all dogs go to heaven — a project that also tested Gutierrez’s confidence by placing him in a studio for the first time. He remembers working with blink-182 drummer Travis Barker, both a muse and guide to the Gen-Zers reviving pop-punk, on “synopsis.” “I think I tweeted about that I had a song with Travis Barker, and everyone was like, ‘Oh, it’s going to be a pop-punk, fucking Machine Gun Kelly–type song,’” he says. Instead, he worked with Barker to chop his drum beat into something glitchy and pummeling, and recorded his vocals separately from the producer, only playing the take back for him when he was finished. “My art,” he says, “is always going to be about me and the stuff I want to make.”

He’s already onto the next step, a joint EP out this fall with ericdoa, one of his best friends and, at 18 years old, a sort of older-brother figure to Gutierrez. The two singles they’ve released, “cloak n dagger” and “fuck this town,” successfully blend Gutierrez’s punkish bravado with ericdoa’s groovy hip-hop stylings. (Gutierrez says a song on the EP called “mental anguish” might be his favorite ever.) He brings ericdoa out for “cloak n dagger” during his set, ahead of a full performance together at MoMA PS1 Warm Up the next day in New York.

By Tuesday, Gutierrez will be sitting in high school classrooms once again, having just started his junior year. He’ll keep balancing his music career with his education “just finish to it, to say I have a high school degree.” Yet more than college or a typical post-grad job, he’s dreaming of headlining sets, world tours, and returning to one of Summer Smash’s main stages in a few years. “I sound very ambitious when I say it, but I would like to take it as far as I can possibly go,” he says. “Obviously, everyone has huge aspirations, but I’m every day working towards doing what I want to do.”

Gutierrez gives his fans a taste of the scope and scale of his vision at the end of the set. He’s been promising the crowd that he might join them for a song, and once it’s time for the closer — his biggest hit, “astrid” — he’s ready. After asking the crowd to “try not to kill me,” he jumps the barrier into a sea of rowdy audience members, who instantly absorb him. He’s easily one of the tallest people here, yet it’s impossible to pick him out from the crowd as everyone shouts the lyrics to the song. Audience members hug him, and someone helps him up when he falls. “I don’t know if that’s weird or whatever, but it felt like I was truly connected to what was going on,” he says later. He’s still riding the high of the performance — “probably the best shit that’s ever happened to me in my life.” Gutierrez thinks of the MoMA PS1 set, and the performances to come after that. “Honestly, if it was even one percent as good as today felt to me, I’d be so happy.”